Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-91
BALTIMORE: It was Intel in particular. Yes, the whole high-tech world came apart in ’99 and
2000, that’s true. And his wealth was almost entirely in Intel; he had never diversified. I had
once, just in an attempt to jump-start this— I must say, I worked very closely with Wally
Weisman in all of this. Gordon was the chairman of the Board of Trustees and Wally was the
vice chairman. I presented Gordon with a plan for a $2 billion infusion into Caltech, and he was
not interested at that point in doing that; so he more or less rejected that plan, so we needed Plan
B. And the campaign was Plan B.
So Wally, who was now going to be chairman of the campaign and was my ally in all of
this, was trying to figure out how to get to Gordon, to make clear to Gordon that he had to make
a commitment to his gift before we structured the campaign because it was going to determine
the size of the campaign and everything else that we did. Wally one day opened his mail and
found a letter from Gordon saying that “I will commit $300 million from my foundation”—
which he had just then established—“and an equivalent amount of money in Intel stock.”
LIPPINCOTT: So, $600 million total
BALTIMORE: Six hundred million total. Actually, he didn’t say how much. He said in the letter
that he would give a $300 million draw on his foundation over ten years and a certain amount of
Intel stock—I’ve forgotten what the number was—which would come in over time. The stock
gift—he consciously said in the letter and had said in our discussion—was a way of shifting the
uncertainty of the value of the stock from him to us, because he was giving it to us in share
numbers, not in dollar denomination. That was a thing I understood. I understood from his point
of view why he was doing that, because then he could define this gift, whereas he couldn’t define
it otherwise, because it was a shifting resource. So I calculated its value.
LIPPINCOTT: You looked into the future
BALTIMORE: I looked into the future. I made a very conservative guess—I thought I was being
conservative; in the end, actually, it was less than I thought. I think the stock was twenty-seven
at the time, and I said “Well, let’s figure we could get thirty for it”—because the stock was way
down at that point—and sized it on thirty. So I called Gordon and I said, “Gordon, we have to
announce this gift.” He said, “Do we really have to announce it” I said, “Yes, Gordon, we have